CES 2024: Venetian Expo Show Floor

Article by Angie Kibiloski

The Main Event

With all of the pre-show Press parties out of the way, it’s time to switch focus to the main event, the exhibit show floors of CES 2024, starting with the Venetian Expo. There’s a lot of exhibit space at the Venetian, both spanning the interconnected Halls A-D and the startup-centric Eureka Park in Hall G downstairs, as well as several floors of private meeting rooms and hospitality suites. I mainly focused on Halls A-D, where product types were concentrated around smart home, food tech, sports and fitness, and accessories, with a small appearance of 3D printing, toys and games, and semiconductors. I couldn’t condense an entire convention center into 5 top products, so here’s a brief look at my 8 highlights from the Venetian Expo.

Home Is Where the Tech Is

The first 3 products on my list are for your home, so you can light it up, clean it up, and keep it pest free. Govee offers a really fun assortment of smart RGBIC LED lighting solutions to custom-brighten and colorize your space. I will absolutely be getting some of them in for review, so I’ll just briefly talk about one of my favorites, the Glide Hexagon Light Panels Ultra. This is a set of 10 hexagonal panels with 3 customizable light planes and 9 edge light strips, which can be joined together in fun patterns on your wall. Use the connected app to choose colors, motion patterns, and even sync them to the rest of your lighting products and on-screen display, so they can reflect the colors within your game or movie. The Glide Hexagon Light Panels Ultra are part of their wider gaming line, which has garnered a partnership with Razer.

Next up we have Eureka, a trusted name in vacuums for 115 years. They were actually debuting several models this year, but the one I want to highlight is the J20, their robotic vacuum and mopping system with an all-in-one base station. Like most robotic cleaning machines, the circular unit roams around your floors to suck or wipe up any dirt or spills, programmed through the connected app and left to manage its own progress. The revolutionary thing about the J20 is that instead of spinning discs beneath the device that tend to smear and scatter as much as gather debris, it has a “RollRenew” mopping belt, which constantly cleans itself in the fresh water reservoir inside. When the unit docks itself in the base station to charge, it will also automatically empty the dirty water and dirt trap, and refill the unit with fresh water for its next route. It makes me wish I had all hard wood floors just so I could have a J20 in my home when it releases in April.

Finally, in the smart home category is the Mosqitter Mini, an eco-friendly way to keep your annoying backyard mosquito population under control. Mosqitter‘s Grand model for commercial use has been such a success, they decided to create a much smaller model for domestic use as well, so consumers could be protected from itchy bites on their patio, campsite, or other small spaces, and for 1/10 of the cost. It works by simulating the human factors that are irresistible to mosquitos, like temperature, odor, and light waves, then amping those up so the device is a more attractive target than the surrounding real humans. The odors are undetectable by humans, and non-toxic to animals or beneficial insects like bees and butterflies. Mosquitos fly into the unit and get trapped, to later be discarded when the trap basin gets full. With the mosquito presence seemingly getting worse every year, my only disappointment is that the Mosqitter Mini won’t be available until Fall, just about when the little biters die out for the year anyway.

All About the Audio

Though unrelated in purpose, there are 2 audio products that I want to discuss, because I like audio and it gets me in the mood for NAMM next week. Fuse has a line of the coolest looking upright record players, for either tabletop or wall-mounted display. Personally, I favor the Wrap for its rounded off boxy base, but their newest upcoming model is the Tek, their 1^st player that can be hung on the wall. They all feature the same upright turntable, with a magnetic post cap to keep your records safely and gently attached behind the quality Audio Technica needles. Both mentioned models have Bluetooth in and out, in case you want to listen to your vinyl from headphones or play other sources through the speakers. The Tek has a vegan “leather” skin while the Wrap is handcrafted with gorgeous ash wood, and both will lend a unique aesthetic to your music space.

From music appreciation to music making, the Revive software from insoundz is using generative AI to isolate and enhance your recorded vocals. Whether you’re a creator laying down vocal tracks for a song, recording an audiobook outside of a soundproofed booth, or making a podcast on-the-go, it’s hard to get away from background noise. Even if you’re in an ideal environment, you might not have the best microphone, or acoustic setup. Revive solves for all of this by detecting just your voice and blocking out any other distracting sounds, using the AI to enhance your vocals and fill in any gaps that may have been caused by noise interference. The software will be customizable in the future to include other intentional sounds, not just voice, and announcements to that effect are anticipated in the near future. Try Revive for free during it’s current test period, and watch for more news after NAMM.

Let’s Play

The first of 3 tech toys I’ll be highlighting neatly bridges the gap between toys and audio. Tonies is a story time toy for young children that has been out for a few years now. Their Toniebox is a small, colorful speaker in the shape of a block, with a surprisingly large number of equally surprisingly well-made, hand-painted character figurines. Each Tonie figure is programmed with a story or some songs, which are activated through the speaker when your child places it on top of the block, and they can easily change the song or story whenever they want by simply swapping the character that’s resting on top. I haven’t written about this before, simply because it was a pretty basic concept, and one I’d experienced with a lesser product in the past. This year caught my attention, however, with the push towards more insightful interactions than just stories and songs.

The brand-new Mindfulness Tonie sloth and Yoga Tonie llama are not only the cutest little figures, but they come loaded with 60-90 minutes of truly helpful guidance. The Mindfulness sloth named Mo teaches kids about meditation, mindfulness, and relaxation, while Sara the Yoga llama teaches them mindfulness, friendship, and obviously yoga. These 2 newest Tonies, along with their series of characters partnering with the Calm app, really open up this product with real potential for me beyond just a speaker box for silly songs. Not gonna lie, I kinda want a Toniebox just so Mo the sloth can help me meditate.

If story time friends aren’t your thing, maybe an autonomous rolling robotic ball will be more your speed. The Ebo X from Enabot is a spherical robot companion with big, cute eyes, that rolls itself around your house performing various functions. Have fun with Ebo X as it plays your favorite playlist from its custom Harman speakers, and let it spice up your dance space with programmable lighting and colorful visual effects. It’ll also interact with your pets when you can’t be there to play with them, following them around and taking photos as they interact. Beyond having fun, it can act as your smart home assistant, with Alexa connectivity as well as its own Ebo Home app. Its home functions include patrolling your home for intruders when you aren’t there, providing a two-way video call feature to chat with you family from afar, and notifying you if it hears a family member calling out for help, to name just a few.

Last in the toy category is Drone Soccer, which isn’t so much a product as a sport, a whole sporting league in fact. I watched in stunned delight as 2 teams of 5 drones inside geodesic ball structures flew willy-nilly around a small netted pitch, trying to fly through the opponent’s hoop in a crazy, Quidditch-style drone battle. It was like watching giant, annoyed, buzzing bees try and shoo other bees away from their Ring Light hive, and it was comically enjoyable. I had no idea this existed, but apparently it’s been a thing since 2016, with a whole Drone Soccer World Cup! I don’t have a specific product link, but there are Drone Soccer teams all around the world you can look into, including a few here in the USA.

Veni Vidi Venetian

As you can probably tell, there was quite a variety of tech to see at the Venetian, and this selection of 8 products only scratched the surface. It’s the most enjoyable of the show floor spaces for me to explore each year, not just because it has the most welcoming atmosphere, but it also always provides the most useful content for future potential reviews. In fact, some of my favorite products from the 3 Press events I’ve already covered, CES Unveiled, Pepcom’s Digital Experience, and ShowStoppers were housed inside Halls A-D as well. Come back in the future for full reviews of some of the above products, and check back tomorrow for my coverage of the LVCC show floor.